Search form

Huawei Mate 30 Pro Loses Back Door To Google Apps

The Huawei Mate 30 Pro, possibly the most advanced smartphone released this year, has reportedly lost access to manually install Google’s Android apps.

Security researcher John Wu published a blog post Tuesday that explained how users of Huawei's Mate 30 Pro were able to manually download and install Google apps, despite a U.S. blacklisting that prohibits the Chinese company from using American components and software, including Android.

But in the wake of the revelations, the Mate 30 devices lost their clearance to manually install Android apps, as reported by a number of smartphone experts.

The installation was made possible thanks to an app, called LZPlay, available from a Chinese website, but LZPlay.net has now been taken offline and those who have downloaded it are finding it behaving differently, suddenly.

“Although this ‘backdoor’ requires user interaction to be enabled, the installer app, which is signed with a special certificate from Huawei, was granted privileges nowhere to be found on standard Android systems,” Wu wrote on Medium.

The U.S. trade war with China has put Huawei on the Entity List which clips a company’s wings when it comes to doing business with America. This meant that when the Mate 30 Pro was revealed, it came with basic, open-source Android and not the more advanced Google Mobile Services, including Google Play Store, Gmail and Google Maps.